New NIST Encryption Guidelines May Force Federal Agencies to Replace Old Websites

Email a friend

To

From

Thank you

Sorry

Next month the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) plans to put out for public review its draft for a new government encryption standard that, when finalized, is going to compel federal agencies with older websites to replace them.

NIST's current standard calls for federal agencies to support Transport Layer Security 1.0 encryption, but the updated version is going to require TLS 1.1 and 1.2, says Tim Polk, computer scientist and group manager for NIST's cryptology technology group. Since websites and browsers support secure communications through TLS, government agencies that haven't already moved to TLS 1.1 and 1.2 need to be aware that they are going to have to in the future, Polk advises.

The new federal government standard, when finalized -- this typically occurs within six months of the release of a draft for public review -- will make it clear there's a time frame that websites and browsers should be up to date. On new requirements.

"Older Web servers probably don't support TLS 1.1 and 1.2," says Polk. He adds that there are probably some agencies that will need to have to acquire new Web server products to support up-to-date TLS. NIST's document expected to be published in September on all this is tentatively entitled "Guidelines for Selection, Configuration and Use of Transport Layer Security Implementations."

The phrase "SSL" technology rather than "TLS" is still often heard, although SSL is a misnomer harking back to the old tech days of Netscape's SSL invention. TLS implementations in older Web servers and browsers are more subject to certain cyberattacks, and that's one main reason to support up-to-date TLS, Polk says.

Other guidance is anticipated in the NIST proposed encryption standard. For instance, "We will require support for certain TLS extensions," including the Extended Validation Certificate guidelines, says Polk.

EV certificates issued by certificate authorities (CAs) are preferred over digital certificates issued otherwise because EV certificates require far more extensive verification of the organization receiving them, and the issuer issuing them that other types of certificates.

The EV certificate standard was devised by the industry group CA/Browser Forum. The CAB Forum is undergoing some turbulent change as its members, including Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Symantec and Apple, among others, make organizational changes, including hashing out decisions related to intellectual-property rights each own pertaining to public-key infrastructure.

"EV certificates have higher levels of assurance associated with them, that they're issued to the right people." says Polk. "We support efforts to move the state-of-the-art forward. We believe for some applications that are important, there is value in it."

NIST also wants the federal government to move forward with what is called "mutually authenticated TLS" in which the server presents you with a way to log in via the user's certificate. "It's not done much today," says Polk. "It's not because most users don't have crypto keys of their own." The federal government has the potential to take advantage of this higher security because of the Personal Identity Validation (PIV) cards that are issued to government employees.

There have been numerous compromises of CAs during the past year or so and NIST is also looking at how federal agencies should be responding to news of a data breach or other type of compromise impacting certificates.

NIST, in a bulletin entitled "Preparing for and Responding to Certification Authority Compromise and Fraudulent Certificate Issuance," explains how the complex world of CAs, registration authorities and relying parties works in the certificate-issuance process. The NIST document, written with some help from Venafi, addresses how things can go wrong, how fraud can occur and what to do and expect from the standpoint of an organization making use of certificates. Many of these ideas are also likely to be incorporated into the upcoming NIST standards as guidelines, Polk suggests.

In spite of security breaches at CAs, does NIST still feel that digital certificates constitute good security for websites, browsers and other purposes?

"In the U.S. government, all of e-commerce is heavily invested in public-key infrastructure," says Polk. Public-key infrastructure based on digital certificates "has quietly become a core technology." Although there have been attacks on PKI, the underlying technology remains solid, he says. "We have confidence that this is a critical technology and one of the strongest tools in the toolkit. But it's not perfect."